How Hardware Startup Accelerators Surprised Me

http://octopart.com/blog/archives/2014/8/how-hardware-startup-accelerators-surprised-me

by emilyn • 12 years ago

24 7 12 years ago

I'm still surprised there isn't a popular company to help these hardware startups with all the myriad choices you have to make in hardware. There's so much that can screw you up in component choices, board printing, plastics, etc. that have no mirror in software.

sam• 12 years ago

Indeed. We hear this a lot and we have some ideas. Stay tuned.

kg4lod• 12 years ago

My company, GetScale, offers cheap fixed-price contract work in design-for-manufacturing (identify and avoid the kinds of mistakes mentioned in the article) and going forward my overseas employees can find and monitor suppliers to make sure things run smoothly (like enforcing your quality standards). We only charge a few dollars per unit for that.

HardwareLover• 12 years ago

There are many companies currently doing that. One of them is HWTrek, an ecosystem with a community of mentors helping hardware startups from product development to mass production to shipping. The platform has elements of Alibaba and LinkedIn, and hardware developers can search for supply chain vendors, manufacturers, software/cloud vendors, VCs, etc. on it.

paulgerhardt• 12 years ago

Where an accelerator provides value is in network.

Going through a program like YC one takes it as a matter of course that the software gets written. It's almost assumed to be a downhill process. The hard part that gets hammered into you is Growth - the program is by and large a merciless, insanely purpose driven, bootcamp-come-network for Growth. Prototypes in, hockey sticks out.

With hardware there is an incircuitable field of well documented terrors, known to be fatal, that stands between conceiving a product and releasing it. The added value of a hardware startup accelerator than is being your Westley when you need to get through the Trough of Fire Swamps. In many cases it's simply plugging you into the group of vendors that can scale parts, manufacturing, and fulfillment - for much of it, what you don't know will kill you and no one person or company knows it all – that's why it takes a network.

Simplified: Hardware accelerators are cool because they are providing value where no one else is (solving the trough of sorrow problem by creating fungible networks). Y Combinator is cool because it pioneered the same thing for growth.

kfihihc• 12 years ago

Hardware startup never like software startup, because hardware product built by the whole ecosystem, such as supplier, manufacturer, etc. And software is built by your laptop. :)

ibisum• 12 years ago

I find it nevertheless amusing that there is some sort of 'special' line in the sand between these apparently two 'divergent fields of focus', because with all computing, from day one, you can't run your software on thin air. (Not yet anyway.) Hardware is where all computing starts - at the very off-switch, which is a physical device. As is all software too, a physical device. You can't have it in the ether .. well you can, and in fact 'the ether' is all software really is, but nevertheless: those bits don't charge/discharge themselves. Well, they do, but.. its a physical thing, dictated across the universe by the distance between a working computer and its conscious user. No user: no usage. No computer: no use. Software can be composed of anything possible between the distance of two real, physical points in the universe: Computer, user. And software always, always, depends on both entities being functionally operational.

The point being, all software efforts are hardware efforts too, whether its considered relevant or not to the budget-sheets being run by the economics of the activity, but in the case where hardware is being designed, built, shipped and used by a customer base, there are some tight ropes to walk.

How Hardware Startup Accelerators Surprised Me

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